The Art of Manliness - Kit Carson's Epic Exploits

00:00:00.000 Hey, this is Brett. This is a rebroadcast of episode number 681, The Epic Exploits of Kit

00:00:05.420 Carson with historian Hampton Sides. Hope you enjoy it. We'll see you on Wednesday with a

00:00:09.540 brand new episode. Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:21.580 Within the space of just three decades, monumental episodes of exploration, expedition,

00:00:25.740 politics, and violence, including the mapping of the Oregon Trail, the acquisition of California,

00:00:30.940 and the Mexican-American Civil Wars forever changed the history of the United States and

00:00:34.840 the shape of the American West. And one man, an illiterate trapper, scout, and soldier was there

00:00:39.520 for it all, Kit Carson. In his book, Blood and Thunder, The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the

00:00:43.920 Conquest of the American West, author and historian Hampton Sides follows Carson as a through line in

00:00:48.800 this extraordinary period of American history. Today on the show, Hampton and I discuss how Kit

00:00:52.860 Carson became a living legend through embellished accounts of his heroics and yet undertook real-life

00:00:57.040 exploits that were nearly as unbelievable as the tall tales told about him. We explore how Carson

00:01:01.660 joined the grizzled fraternity of mountain men in his youth and the wide array of skills that helped

00:01:05.380 him excel as a trapper. We discuss how Carson then parlayed those skills into becoming a scout

00:01:09.880 on expeditions that took him from St. Louis to California, over the Rocky and Sierra Mountains,

00:01:14.140 and all throughout the wild, rugged West. Hampton shares how these expeditions turned Carson

00:01:18.120 into a national celebrity and what this frontiersman thought of his fame. Hampton also impacts

00:01:22.280 Carson's complex relationship with American Indians and how he respected and adopted the ways of

00:01:26.580 some tribes and yet fought viciously against others. And we end our conversation with why he

00:01:30.700 decided to become an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, his initially reluctant and

00:01:34.700 then brutal campaigns against the Navajos, and his legacy today. After the show's over, check out

00:01:38.920 our show notes at aom.is slash Carson. Hampton joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:43.960 All right, Hampton Sides, welcome back to the show.

00:01:59.140 It's good to be with you.

00:02:00.360 So we had you on a couple years ago to talk about your book, On Desperate Ground, which was about

00:02:04.260 the greatest battle of the Korean War, The Chosen Reservoir. Brought you back on because I want to 0.99

00:02:09.220 talk about a book you wrote, it's almost 13 years ago. And I think you started it even like back in

00:02:14.140 2002. It's called Blood and Thunder. And it's about the famed trapper, mountain man, scout, soldier,

00:02:22.600 Kit Carson. I'm curious, what drew you to Kit Carson as a subject?

00:02:28.520 Well, Blood and Thunder isn't really a biography of Kit Carson. It's, you know, it's using Kit Carson

00:02:36.560 as a through line to tell a much bigger story. And what drew me to Kit Carson was that this one man

00:02:43.500 in the span of one lifetime went everywhere, did everything, knew everybody, somehow intersected

00:02:51.200 with history in this consequential way, and enabled me as a writer to tell this bigger story of the

00:02:59.820 conquest of the American West. In a single generation, the Western third of the continent 0.77

00:03:05.320 became the United States. What's amazing about Carson is that even though he wasn't a general

00:03:12.420 West Pointer, a writer, a big-time politician, you know, he was essentially a nobody, an illiterate

00:03:18.700 frontiersman, he knew everybody. And when you start charting the big events of Manifest Destiny and the

00:03:27.140 conquest of the West, somehow or another, he was there. He was always there. Or if he was not there,

00:03:34.720 he missed it by five minutes, you know, his best friend was there or his wife was there or his,

00:03:39.860 you know. So it's a great through line to write about this much bigger story, which is really what

00:03:47.060 I was interested in because I had moved to the West. I moved here to Santa Fe and I was looking for a big

00:03:52.880 canvas kind of story to sink my teeth into, try to understand this land out here and how it became

00:04:01.820 part of the United States. It really then becomes the story of Native Americans. It becomes the story

00:04:07.160 of Spanish Americans, the mountain men who were mostly French, and these sort of spiral of events

00:04:14.860 that led to finally the Mexican-American War and also the Civil War, which most people don't realize

00:04:21.320 there were actually some pretty consequential battles that took place here in the West during the Civil

00:04:27.660 War. So it's got all these different chapters and episodes, but that through line that keeps

00:04:33.320 returning is this one man who is very controversial. He was an Indian lover and he was an Indian killer. 0.58

00:04:42.480 He married into, his first wife was Arapaho, his second wife was Cheyenne. He spoke six or seven 0.92

00:04:49.960 different Indian languages, but he also fought against different tribes and especially is famous for his

00:04:56.280 conquering the Navajo and leading them on their notorious long walk. So I was drawn to that part 1.00

00:05:04.460 of Carson's life too. The fact that he was so controversial, so conflicted, had sort of this

00:05:10.340 deep love and appreciation for Native American culture, but also fought against Native Americans

00:05:16.360 in big ways that still have ramifications today. So yeah, I think when I read this book, I was like,

00:05:22.160 this is just, it's, it's epic. I mean, the stuff that happened in like, in a short amount of time

00:05:26.360 from like the 1840s till the 1860s, I mean, it's mind boggling, like how much happened. I think what

00:05:34.260 we've been going through in the past decade here in the modern age, I think, oh man, things are just

00:05:37.920 going so fast, but like big changes, monumental changes happened in a matter of years back then.

00:05:44.200 Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially during the Mexican-American war, when, when President Polk

00:05:51.120 took office, he cast his eye West and, you know, he decided he wanted all of it. You know,

00:06:00.240 he wanted the Oregon territory, which is, or Oregon and Washington now. He wanted California,

00:06:06.000 which was nominally part of Mexico, but was kind of semi-independent. He wanted

00:06:13.240 the New Mexico territory, which was part of Mexico and he wanted Texas and, you know,

00:06:19.680 everything in between. He wanted, he wanted ports on the Pacific. He wanted

00:06:24.040 this relatively small country to become an empire. And he wanted, he wanted it all in, in, in, in one

00:06:33.200 fell swoop and he got it all during the Mexican-American war. It was a, it was a brutal and relentless 0.96

00:06:41.240 land grab. It was pretty shameful in many, in many respects, but he achieved what he sought out to do.

00:06:49.480 After one term in office, he went home to Tennessee and in a few months he was dead. James K. Polk kind

00:06:56.480 of came out of nowhere and achieved what he said he was going to do. And suddenly the United States

00:07:03.200 had grown by about the size of continental Europe. It's just, yes. And those events that led to all

00:07:12.460 that just happened so fast and furious. And it's so hard to even keep track of them all and all the

00:07:18.240 different characters. But one person just kind of treads right through the middle of it. And that's

00:07:23.720 Kit Carson. And that's why he became such an interesting kind of connective tissue for this

00:07:30.200 larger story. Well, let's look at the life of Kit Carson. And along the way, we can talk about some

00:07:35.220 of these big events that he was involved with, with, with an American history. So let's start off

00:07:39.840 when he was born. What was America like when Kit Carson was born? Well, he was born in Kentucky,

00:07:45.800 but moved very, very soon thereafter to Kentucky. And, you know, there was, there was this

00:07:52.340 slow but steady march westward to find, you know, untouched land. And he, he was part of that

00:08:03.140 movement. His parents were, he was distantly related to Daniel Boone. And these were true 1.00

00:08:09.780 frontiersmen. They moved to Missouri, but beyond Missouri, you know, it was wilderness. And the notion

00:08:17.780 was that sort of the middle third of the country was going to be set aside for the Native American

00:08:23.820 tribes, many of whom had been relocated, forcibly relocated during the Trail of Tears and other,

00:08:30.380 and other forced relocation sagas like that. But then beyond the plains, there was this all,

00:08:38.040 this whole other part of the continent that was not very well understood. It was, part of it was in,

00:08:45.060 you know, part of Mexico. Part of it was just wilderness that had been not, you know, had not

00:08:50.560 been mapped or explored very much. And then you finally get to the Pacific coast and you get a

00:08:57.420 different continental powers that are vying for and interested in controlling particularly the Pacific

00:09:05.000 Northwest. The British are interested in it and have lots of little tentacles in that part of the 0.98

00:09:11.780 world. The Russians are still trapping and exploring up around Alaska and working their way down the 1.00

00:09:18.800 coast. California was part of Mexico and, you know, and by extension, part of the greater kind of

00:09:27.500 Spanish empire. So everyone had their eyes on this great prize of kind of the virgin far west. And

00:09:36.520 the United States was beginning to express its interest in having all that. And so Carson's

00:09:45.340 family moved from Kentucky to Missouri, which was, that was the end of the line. I mean, you know,

00:09:51.820 St. Louis was kind of the gateway to wilderness. And there was a trail that was formed from Independence,

00:10:01.520 Missouri to Santa Fe, known as the Santa Fe Trail. And that was kind of the one little tentacle that,

00:10:08.860 you know, where there was some trade and there, you know, there were, there was expeditions

00:10:11.940 west. And Carson, as a young boy, his father died when he was eight. And his stepfather, he butted heads

00:10:21.280 with his stepfather and he wanted to get the hell out of his home environment. He became an apprentice

00:10:27.620 to a saddle maker. But then he started, you know, hearing these stories about these mountain men,

00:10:34.060 these people out west that came west on the Santa Fe Trail and went into the mountains and trapped

00:10:39.720 beaver. There was a tremendous amount of money to be made doing that. It was an adventurous life. It was

00:10:44.280 a dangerous life, but he wanted to be part of this fraternity of greasy, grizzled old mountain men.

00:10:51.020 And he ran away. When he was about 16, he ran, ran away to Santa Fe and really never looked back.

00:10:58.880 He went up into the mountains up around Taos and he slowly but surely worked his way into this fraternity

00:11:05.040 of men and became, in the end, one of the most famous mountain men of all. So that's how he got his start

00:11:11.620 in the west, trapping beaver, which was an incredibly valuable asset because, really, because

00:11:19.460 for some reason, people back in London and Paris and New York had decided that a beaver hat was the

00:11:27.540 finest hat you could have. It was a fashion statement. And so, you know, really, these men

00:11:35.040 became so proficient at trapping beaver that beaver became nearly extinct in many parts of the west.

00:11:41.780 But along the way, they learned how the rivers, you know, how the drainages flowed, you know,

00:11:46.400 where, which, you know, the big rivers, the little rivers, they learned essentially, if not formally to

00:11:52.780 map the west, at least to get around. So they sort of made a mental map of the west. And these mountain

00:11:59.640 men, with all this knowledge of this territory that was otherwise unexplored, then went on to become

00:12:07.960 scouts and guides in various topographical expeditions into the west. And so this was

00:12:15.640 valuable information that they had. And Carson was, you know, proved to be the very best one of all of

00:12:20.620 the mountain men to make that transition from trapping beaver to guiding formal expeditions

00:12:26.860 into the west.

00:12:28.600 Well, one thing you talk about, and you quote people who talked about the skills that Carson

00:12:34.120 had. I mean, he was just, in any situation in the west and the wilds, like, he could handle

00:12:38.700 himself. And what were some of the skills that he was famous for that he had?

00:12:42.480 It wasn't any one thing that Carson had that made him so competent at what he did. It was a kind of

00:12:48.760 a panoply of skills. He knew when to fight. He knew when to bluff. He knew when to negotiate. He was

00:12:57.720 cool under pressure. He was really, you know, he was a great horseman, although most of these guys

00:13:05.240 didn't have horses. They had mules. They really trusted their mules. And, you know, they always say,

00:13:11.000 you know, the horse won the west. It actually wasn't a horse. It was a mule that won the west.

00:13:16.660 But Carson was, you know, good with a knife. He was good in a fight. He was an expert marksman,

00:13:23.200 a good hunter. He was a decent cook. He was just somebody you wanted on your side when you're out

00:13:33.380 in the wilds. And it's kind of extraordinary, given how many scrapes he got into with different

00:13:40.080 Native American tribes over the decades, that he lived to a fairly ripe old age in those days and

00:13:47.700 died of natural causes. He somehow knew where to be and had a sixth sense for, you know, when to fight

00:13:55.360 and when to avoid a fight. He also had a really remarkable, even though he was illiterate, a

00:14:02.360 remarkable gift for language. He was fluent in Spanish. He was fairly fluent in French. And he

00:14:09.260 knew multiple Native American languages and sign language. So he was great at communicating. And

00:14:15.620 all the different expeditions remark about that, that, you know, he was the guy that came forward

00:14:21.940 and, you know, figured out what was going on and communicated with the local tribes and, you know,

00:14:28.160 was able to negotiate whatever it is they wanted or needed at the time. So those are some of his

00:14:33.700 skills. He certainly had a temper. And if you riled him, he would not back down. He was ferocious

00:14:43.480 and he was relentless and he would pursue you. And I guess that's his other famous skill was pursuing

00:14:49.860 people. He was an amazing tracker and would sometimes track a fugitive or, in one famous case,

00:14:59.300 a woman who had been kidnapped for days and days and days across the mountains and the plains. And he

00:15:07.600 could read, you know, read the signs on the ground and was quite famous for this skill, which is really

00:15:15.640 almost mystical skill, you know, to look at the grass and try to determine how old a particular

00:15:25.700 footprint is. You know, I don't know how people do that, but he was apparently phenomenal at that

00:15:32.240 skill. Well, it was during his time as a mountain man where his complex relationship with Native 0.90

00:15:37.520 Americans began. This is when he married. He married two Native American women during this time.

00:15:41.340 Yes. His first wife singing grass was Arapaho. And a lot of people say that those were his happiest

00:15:48.900 years was when he lived with her tribe, her band of Arapaho Indians, and really lived more like an

00:15:54.800 Indian than a white guy, than an Anglo, and had two children with her. Unfortunately, she died in

00:16:02.240 childbirth. He raised their children and along the way married a Cheyenne woman. That marriage

00:16:11.100 did not work out very well. And it ended in what they call the Cheyenne divorce, where she basically 0.99

00:16:16.720 kicked him out of her teepee. But, you know, all this is just to say that he was somebody who

00:16:22.020 respected and, you know, found a lot of power in Native American traditions and language and

00:16:31.620 lived with great respect for certain Native American tribes. There were other tribes that he seemed to spend

00:16:38.800 much of his life fighting against. And maybe foremost among those were the Blackfeet and also 0.95

00:16:45.000 the Comanches and sometimes the Kiowas. So, he didn't really look at Native Americans in a monolithic

00:16:51.720 way, like Indians, you know, out there. He was very specific in his allegiance to certain tribes

00:16:59.480 tribes and his often lifelong antipathy to other tribes. So, it was very interesting. His third and

00:17:07.660 his final wife was Spanish, came from an old Spanish family in Taos, Josefa Jaramillo. And so,

00:17:15.800 he then sort of just organically morphed again into kind of like a Spanish guy. He spoke Spanish. He

00:17:25.600 converted to Catholicism. He raised his kids to speak Spanish as Catholics and lived in Taos and

00:17:33.220 viewed himself as allied, you know, aligned with Spanish New Mexico, which, of course, they've been

00:17:40.880 there for hundreds of years. So, it's interesting. This guy just keeps kind of like a zealot figure,

00:17:47.600 you know, he keeps kind of changing into whatever, you know, and he's like a cat who had nine lives.

00:17:54.220 He, you know, went from being a mountain man to, you know, being a rancher to being a scout and a

00:18:01.120 hunter. And then he became, finally joined the regular army, the Union army, and fought against

00:18:08.400 the Confederates in several battles. And then became, at the end of his life, he became a brigadier general.

00:18:16.040 So, he, and there's a couple of other incarnations I just skipped over, like an inter, a cross-continental

00:18:24.120 courier. He rode to Washington to give messages. And he was, you know, he's a scout and he was a guide

00:18:31.080 and he was so many other things. So, he had this real talent for sort of rebooting himself. As soon as

00:18:38.000 one lifestyle seemed to dry up or one set of opportunities evaporated, he would just recreate

00:18:45.640 himself anew.

00:18:47.460 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:18:50.880 And now back to the show.

00:18:52.860 Well, so as a trapper, he started to make a name for himself, but like where this, where he became

00:18:57.320 like almost a living legend was when he became the scout for Fremont, John Fremont. So, for those who

00:19:04.520 aren't familiar, who was John Fremont and why was he exploring the West?

00:19:09.180 Yeah. Well, John C. Fremont was a botanist and a cartographer living in Washington. Very talented,

00:19:18.160 very ambitious, young man, very good-looking dude. Ladies seemed to think he was extremely handsome

00:19:25.760 and dashing. And he had, his ambition really knew no bounds. He was all those things I mentioned,

00:19:32.880 but he really wanted to be president someday. And like a lot of ambitious young men, he married a

00:19:42.820 woman who is the daughter of a very, very powerful man. And this man was Senator Thomas Hart Benton from

00:19:51.540 Missouri, one of the architects, if not the principal architect of Manifest Destiny. John C. Fremont

00:19:58.500 knew that Benton was his sort of ticket to get to where he wanted to go, which was to explore the West,

00:20:07.020 map the West, and then somehow use his fame and celebrity to catapult into a political career.

00:20:14.660 Well, it worked out pretty much the way he envisioned it. He married Benton's daughter,

00:20:18.980 Jessie Fremont, who was herself just a remarkable woman who, you know, was educated pretty much the way,

00:20:27.920 you know, if the Senator had had a son, this is the way he would have educated his son. She didn't go to

00:20:34.340 finishing school or anything like that. She, she got a rigorous education and was a, just a very

00:20:41.500 shrewd political creature herself. And they became, John C. Fremont and Jessie became kind of like a

00:20:50.360 Washington's original power couple. He would go on these expeditions and come back and she would do

00:20:57.700 most of the writing because she was a very talented writer and understood kind of the PR aspect of all

00:21:05.720 this. It's like one thing to go and describe a bunch of plants and the topography and try to do it

00:21:13.100 in a scientific fashion. But those reports that Fremont wrote were rather dull and rather dry.

00:21:19.940 She would take these reports and turn them into great stories that became best-selling books and

00:21:26.480 that ensured her husband's fame and fortune. And in these books, Fremont was, you know, a dashing

00:21:35.800 hero, but perhaps even more dashing hero as depicted in those books was Kit Carson. And that's really how

00:21:42.200 Kit Carson became famous. It seems like, you know, on every page, Carson was doing some,

00:21:47.400 something daring, something bold, you know, that he was plucky and resourceful and got the expedition

00:21:53.660 out of innumerable scrapes. So Carson kind of owed his fame to John C. Fremont and, and, and Fremont's

00:22:03.260 wife, Jessie. Carson, however, didn't understand that celebrity. He didn't like that celebrity. He,

00:22:09.700 he was a pretty shy and awkward guy. He didn't, he didn't understand why people back East seemed to

00:22:15.680 know his name. He had spent his youth trying to get away from America. And suddenly he was a,

00:22:21.960 this almost like a action figure hero. He became then the subject of all these pulp novels that were

00:22:30.460 written. I mean, really bad, most of them very bad novels, but there were kind of precursors to

00:22:36.060 what we now call a Western. And often Kit Carson was the star of these books, the protagonist. And,

00:22:45.380 you know, somehow they turned him into like six foot eight, blonde, blue eyed, you know, Aryan 0.97

00:22:51.360 Viking or something. And he was like five, four, not particularly handsome, shy and awkward around the

00:22:59.320 ladies. He just didn't, you know, they, they, they turned him into something else, a kind of a 1.00

00:23:04.440 caricature. And he spent much of his life trying to live that caricature down, trying to understand it.

00:23:10.580 And he didn't get any money from these books. They didn't get his permission to use his name.

00:23:15.800 And the ultimate irony was he couldn't read these books, you know, because he was illiterate.

00:23:22.720 So he had to have other people read to him, these exploits that were completely, I mean, Carson had an

00:23:31.000 amazing life and he did amazing things, but of course that wasn't good enough for these novelists who

00:23:35.820 had to exaggerate. It would say like, Kit Carson would kill two Indians before breakfast and which

00:23:44.020 presumably was a good thing back then, considered a good thing. And it really, it really set up this

00:23:50.760 mythology that Carson spent the rest of his life trying to live down. But all of it goes back to

00:23:57.360 Fremont's expeditions, which Benton, Senator Benton was instrumental in commissioning. They left from

00:24:04.320 St. Louis. There was three main Fremont expeditions. So Fremont's expeditions West really were important

00:24:13.680 historically because he kind of charted and mapped the Oregon Trail, which was then a very crude

00:24:21.980 and dangerous route west towards the northwest across the Great Plains. And after his books came out,

00:24:32.280 books that were largely written by his wife, this kind of ignited this great migration of pioneers.

00:24:38.740 And people said, well, maybe it's not so dangerous. Let's all, you know, then en masse began to

00:24:44.660 migrate west along the Oregon Trail. So this is an instance in which cartography and exploration led

00:24:53.420 directly to settlement on a big scale, all part of a kind of a master plan of Benton and the others who

00:25:01.520 wanted, really wanted the United States to be a continental empire from shore to shore, from sea to

00:25:12.080 shining sea. And it basically worked. You know, the first, the first act of occupation and settlement is

00:25:19.320 first exploration. And Fremont led those early expeditions and Carson was his guide. And their

00:25:27.400 friendship is also a very interesting dynamic in the book is that, you know, the, these two guys were

00:25:34.760 kind of codependent, Fremont and Carson, two people who seem to really need each other. You know, Carson,

00:25:41.820 very self-reliant guy, but also very conscious of the fact that he was illiterate, that there was a whole

00:25:49.980 world back east of educated people, powerful people that he was curious about. Fremont,

00:25:57.400 was quite educated and, you know, Carson seemed to defer to him in many ways. When Fremont asked him

00:26:06.500 to go do something, sometimes a very unsavory thing, Carson would do it. He was dutiful to a fault.

00:26:14.100 And Fremont, meanwhile, he just, he needed a guide. He needed somebody who really knew the west. He

00:26:18.820 needed someone who was really proficient in all those skills of survival in an extreme environment

00:26:24.780 that Carson already had, having been a mountain man for, for all those years. So these two men

00:26:30.360 very much were, I guess, in modern parlance, we'd say they were codependent or they, you know,

00:26:36.720 they, they very much relied on each other and they, they did remain friends for, for the rest of their

00:26:41.780 lives. So it's an interesting part of Carson's life is, is the extent to which he identified with

00:26:49.360 Fremont and needed Fremont somehow to, um, almost like a father figure that Carson seemed to need to

00:26:55.700 have. Well, going back to that, you know, this, the celebrity and the books that were written

00:26:59.800 back, Carson, one of the most like poignant moments in the book is when you describe this,

00:27:04.640 this is like after, I think this is during, after the civil war, when he was basically fighting

00:27:09.360 Native Americans, there was a family of settlers. They were kidnapped. White was their last name?

00:27:16.240 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Carson went to go hunt her, you know, find her from these, I think it was a 1.00

00:27:21.920 Native American tribe that kidnapped her and he found her, but she was already, she was already 0.98

00:27:27.700 dead. Uh-huh. But amongst her possessions, she had a book about Kit Carson, you know, who came and

00:27:33.580 saved people. And, you know, that was just like one of those moments, like he, he couldn't live up

00:27:37.520 to the legend. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that is a famous story and it's, it's a hundred percent

00:27:43.540 true. It's almost, it's fabulous, you know, like something that seems so, it seems like it is a

00:27:53.280 made up story, but it is true. He got the assignment essentially to go find this woman who had been

00:28:01.140 kidnapped by Hickory Apaches on the, on the plains. And he spent nearly a week tracking her across

00:28:09.760 the staked plains and he found her, but unfortunately she'd been killed. As you say,

00:28:16.420 in her possessions, they found, uh, the very first blood and thunder book, this, these, these horrible

00:28:21.700 pulp Westerns. And in that book, in that particular story, he was the protagonist. And in the weird

00:28:28.920 plot line of the book was that he had gotten the assignment to go find a woman who'd been captured,

00:28:34.240 who'd captured and kidnapped by native Americans. And he went and found her and saved the day and

00:28:40.960 won her, you know, back and brought her back to her family. That's, that's in the novel. So, and,

00:28:47.720 you know, but he couldn't in real life live up to that legend. And, you know, of course he couldn't

00:28:53.820 read the story either. Someone read it to him and he was like, it just, uh, it was like the first time

00:29:01.260 that he ever became aware of his own legend, you know, that he was some kind of mythological

00:29:08.120 figure back East that these novels were. And of course, this was the first of many

00:29:14.320 of these terrible novels, but it is an amazing story. And, uh, and, uh, Anne White was her name.

00:29:22.160 You can't make this up that her name was White. Her, she'd be coming down the Santa Fe trail 1.00

00:29:28.260 with her family. All the men in her group were killed, but she and her African-American

00:29:35.040 slave and her daughter or baby daughter were kidnapped. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's just

00:29:44.480 one of, you know, this is the thing tracking down stories about kid Carson is just, you know,

00:29:50.120 it's a full-time job. It took, kept me busy for years and years because, you know, there's just so

00:29:55.360 many of them and many of them are false. Uh, many of them were exaggerated, but just as many of them

00:30:01.680 are true. Uh, and you know, it's like if something like that happened in my life, I would say, you

00:30:06.620 know, that was like probably the biggest thing that ever happened to me. The most, well, he had like

00:30:10.680 dozens and dozens and dozens of those kinds of stories all in one life. So it really is kind of

00:30:17.000 an extraordinary thing to think about just all the episodes and incarnations and just tall tales that,

00:30:25.360 actually proved to be true that happened to this one man.

00:30:29.240 So we talked about, so he's a scout for Fremont, the expeditions to California that eventually morphed

00:30:35.420 into the Mexican-American war. There was some crazy stuff in that chapter of like insurrections going

00:30:39.960 on and just nutty stuff. The Mexican-American war happened. Carson got roped into that. He started 0.99

00:30:46.580 working with, I was Kearney was the general of the army of the West started fighting in the Mexican-American

00:30:52.300 war. But then after the Mexican-American war, Carson continued to be a soldier. And he actually

00:30:57.980 became an officer for the union army during the civil war. You know, he was rather reluctant to do

00:31:04.360 that. And it was kind of complicated in the sense that, you know, he was originally from Missouri and

00:31:10.120 most of his brothers had sided with the Confederacy and, you know, why he decided to become union officer

00:31:19.160 is kind of interesting, but he, but he did. And he, and one of the many reasons he did is because

00:31:25.280 there was an army coming from Texas to try to claim New Mexico and Colorado for the Confederacy.

00:31:32.780 And Spanish New Mexicans for generations and generations had had this fear and loathing of

00:31:40.200 Texans. In some, in some senses, they, we still do.

00:31:44.160 Tejanos. You got to watch out for the Tejanos. 0.99

00:31:45.840 Yeah. Right. The Tejanos. Yeah. And there, you know, so he was able to recruit very quickly,

00:31:51.280 a pretty large army of Spanish New Mexicans that he commanded and fought against those Texans when

00:31:58.920 they came up the Rio Grande at a place called Val Verde, a really important battle. And one that

00:32:04.840 I think most Americans don't even know happened at all. And, you know, after the Texans were sent back

00:32:12.120 to Texas where they belong, you know, Carson, Harry was still in the union army and he, he basically

00:32:18.620 wanted to go back to Taos and be with his wife and family. But a general by the name of Carlton came

00:32:24.840 along and said, no, well, we're on a war footing now. Why don't we now go after some of these tribes 1.00

00:32:33.020 that keep attacking the settlements along the Rio Grande, the wandering tribes, the raiding tribes.

00:32:40.840 And foremost among those at that time were the Navajo, the Diné. And this general Carlton came up 1.00

00:32:47.760 with this plan to round up all the Diné, one of the largest tribes even then, and certainly now in, 0.78

00:32:55.600 in America and move them to a reservation on the Pecos River where they could be watched and where

00:33:04.480 they could be taught to be sedentary Christian farmers, like completely rewire their society 1.00

00:33:11.620 because they were, what they really were, were semi-nomadic sheep herders. And, you know,

00:33:18.160 moving over a huge piece of land, the Diné country was just massive all over the Four Corners region of

00:33:25.960 what we call them the Four Corners now of the United States. And when General Carlton came up with this

00:33:31.900 ambitious plan to sort of rewire the Navajo, he decided that he had to have Carson to actually lead 0.99

00:33:38.340 it. And Carson tried to resign. He didn't really want any part of this. He said he had, he had joined

00:33:45.340 the Union Army to fight Texans, not Native Americans. But in the end, he signed on and he

00:33:52.460 thus began really the chapter of his life, the episode of his life for which he is now widely

00:34:00.160 reviled and, you know, hated by Native Americans and hated for just the ferocity of this scorched earth 0.99

00:34:09.160 campaign that he led into Navajo country to break their spirit, break their back, you know, break the 1.00

00:34:15.760 back of their nation and to march them to this kind of like a prison camp on the Pecos River.

00:34:22.600 This is probably what he's most famous for now. And this long life of many twists and turns comes

00:34:28.280 down to one of the last chapters of his life, the Navajo campaigns.

00:34:32.660 And I thought this was, I mean, this was, this was happening during the Civil War. But I thought

00:34:37.080 it was interesting because most people think, you know, after the Civil War, the Union Army

00:34:40.600 started, they started the American Indian Wars. I mean, Sherman was a big part of that. Like this

00:34:45.220 was the precursor to that.

00:34:46.680 Yeah. Well, Carson found that it was almost impossible to fight the Navajo, you know, that they, 1.00

00:34:53.780 they didn't fight pitched battles, you know, they would raid and retreat, raid and retreat. And

00:35:00.880 Navajo country is so wrinkled and full of canyons. And, you know, they would just disappear. They

00:35:07.460 would vanish into this massive wilderness. And so the only way Carson could fight them was to starve

00:35:13.940 them to death, was to kind of, even before Sherman led his scorched earth campaign across the American

00:35:19.980 South, Carson was doing this and perfecting it, burning every cornfield, destroying every orchard,

00:35:29.140 slaughtering every sheep, every cow, every horse that they came across, poisoning water sources,

00:35:36.580 destroying salt sources, literally starving the Navajo slowly but surely to death. And, you know, 0.96

00:35:44.400 this is one of the reasons why the Navajo, you know, they never forgot and they never forgave. It's like 1.00

00:35:50.180 it happened yesterday because it really had a psychic effect because not only were they being

00:35:57.380 attacked, but it was their very land, their sacred land was being attacked. And Carson proved to be

00:36:04.000 very good at this. He didn't want to do it. He tried to resign several times, but once he signed on,

00:36:10.900 you know, he was brutal. And, and it worked because of in tens and twenties, and then finally by the

00:36:19.980 hundreds and thousands, the Navajo surrendered and they went on their long walk. This experiment on the 1.00

00:36:26.380 Pecos river did not go well. They hated it. They were miserable. They refused to plant their crops.

00:36:34.060 They didn't want to become Christian farmers. They wanted to go back to their, their, you know, 1.00

00:36:42.520 their beloved land. And after the civil war, actually Sherman, who you mentioned does come out

00:36:47.760 to negotiate some treaties and decides that this experiment was a abject failure. And the Navajo 1.00

00:36:55.560 after much discussion, they decided to return them back to their homeland, which is one of the very 1.00

00:37:01.980 rare instances in our history where, you know, no one, no one apologized, but they admitted the failure

00:37:11.320 of relocating a people forcibly. And they actually returned them to their ancestral lands, which is 0.72

00:37:18.180 instead of Oklahoma or some other place, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles from where they actually

00:37:23.700 are from. So the Navajo were returned in this, uh, another long walk, but a joyous one back to the

00:37:32.020 Dine country where they, they are now the largest, the largest, uh, reservation in the, in the country. 1.00

00:37:39.180 And one of the largest native American tribes in the, in the country. So, but you know, Carson,

00:37:46.060 like I've said several times, he was illiterate. We don't really know what he thought and felt

00:37:53.440 about all of this. I think he felt, there, there are some indications that he, he certainly felt

00:37:59.960 reluctant to do it in the first place. And then he felt, obviously, um, he recognized that it was a

00:38:05.880 failure, that it didn't work. And many, you know, thousands of Navajo died. There was outbreaks of

00:38:11.600 different diseases and, you know, it was, you know, just a great tragedy that didn't really need to

00:38:18.440 happen. And again, Carson was kind of at the center of it, but he did spend the rest of his life

00:38:24.020 really quite directly advocating on behalf of various Native American tribes and establishing

00:38:32.100 treaties with particularly, he was very close to the Utes and went all the way to Washington with a

00:38:38.320 group of Ute elders and negotiated a treaty that was quite successful for, for, and led to the creation

00:38:46.260 of their own sovereign lands. But this Navajo campaign, I think just remained a stain on his 1.00

00:38:53.280 career for the rest of his life and really is the thing that he's most famous for all these many years

00:39:00.280 later. Yeah. I mean, I thought you said how Carson, like he, ever since he was a trapper,

00:39:07.640 like, like the way he looked at Native Americans, he looked at, he viewed Native Americans as Native

00:39:12.880 Americans viewed Native Americans, right? It's like, instead of a white person, a European at the

00:39:17.760 time, like think of Native Americans as a monolith and they're all the same. Carson understood, no,

00:39:22.680 like they, like they, they all think they're the best people. Like they are, like the Comanches are 1.00

00:39:27.980 the people or the Utes are the people and every other tribe. And Carson kind of had that worldview as

00:39:34.440 well. Right. He did. He did. And to his credit, I mean, I, I think that he isn't, you know, in a

00:39:40.540 completely different class of figures in the American West. I mean, this was no Sheridan. This

00:39:46.180 was no Chivington famous for his massacres. This was no Custer. This was a guy who really actually

00:39:53.520 understood a lot about Native American life and saw that most of these clashes that were happening out

00:40:01.180 in the West were happening because white settlers, white miners, you know, Mormons and missionaries 0.94

00:40:07.320 were changing the West and encroaching on Native American territory. And he hated what was happening.

00:40:15.520 And I think maybe on some level, he understood that he himself had brought this on by virtue of

00:40:22.700 leading those expeditions to the West. And, you know, he had sort of fouled his own nest because he

00:40:28.940 loved the American West and, you know, the, you know, the pristine West that he roamed over when

00:40:36.440 he was in his twenties as a mountain man had been ruined by, by, you know, igniting these mass

00:40:44.000 migrations of, of Europeans, Anglo, Anglo Americans. So, you know, in his later years, as he's negotiating

00:40:51.780 treaties and giving testimony to Congress, you see a very different Carson. He's, he's quite

00:40:58.660 contrite. Uh, uh, he hates what has happened to the West and he hates, you know, I mean, there's just

00:41:06.160 a lot, you know, a lot of, of course, don't forget the gold rush, which he actually is thought to have

00:41:13.640 played a bit, bit of a role in himself. He, uh, he may have, he was transmitting some messages to

00:41:20.240 Washington and in one of the saddlebags, it's thought that the very first mention of gold being

00:41:26.780 found in California was in one of those saddlebags. So, I mean, even, even the gold rush, he may have

00:41:32.000 helped ignite. And, you know, I think the real tragedy of Carson's life story is that he kind of

00:41:39.880 ruined his own paradise in one lifetime. And, you know, near the end of his life,

00:41:46.160 the transcontinental railroad has come. And I mean, the old West that he knew is over and it's a whole,

00:41:54.340 it's a whole different world when he died in 1868. Well, Hampton, where can people go to learn more

00:41:59.860 about this book and the rest of your work? Well, obviously, you know, anywhere where books are sold,

00:42:06.080 but I always encourage people to go to independent bookstores, which are struggling and suffering during

00:42:11.300 this pandemic, or my website, which has legit all kinds of information, which is hamptonsides.com.

00:42:19.700 Fantastic. Well, Hampton Sides, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:42:22.260 I've really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

00:42:24.360 My guest today was Hampton Sides. We talked about his book, Blood and Thunder,

00:42:27.380 the Epic Story of Kit Carson, The Conquest of the American West. It's available on amazon.com

00:42:31.780 and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his website,

00:42:34.920 hamptonsides.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Carson. You can find links to

00:42:40.540 resources. We can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM

00:42:51.960 podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives,

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The Art of Manliness - January 23, 2023

Kit Carson's Epic Exploits

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